There are differences between “hearing” and “listening”. Hearing means that the sound you hear everywhere and every day, but you don’t really pay attention. For example, the sounds of trains, airplanes, cars, buses, and so on. We hear those sounds every day, but we don’t really pay attention to it unless we have reason to do otherwise we ignore them.  On the other hand, listening is about paying attention to the sound you hear, and it requires a conscious effort. I believe that we can make choices about what we listen to avoid unnecessary noise. For example, we listen to music to avoid unnecessary background noises that come in our every day’s life. Digital technology has changed our public spaces to private spaces of listening to music and sounds through the advent of headphones, digital podcasts, and audio devices. I believe that structural features, such as race, or social class, inform how we listen. For example, I like to listen to natural sounds such as birds chirping, the sound of rain or river and it calms me down because I grew up listening to those natural sounds in Nepal.

Schafer in the ” The Soundscape” discusses that soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans. He also tells us that “noise pollution is now a world problem”. On the other hand, Krukowski in the “ways of hearing” tells us that how digital technology is privatizing public space. We can understand that the noise in New York city is considered a challenge. Schafer talks about the noises that are coming from everywhere such as buses, cars, trains etc. and these noise pollutions need to be taken care of and Krukowski talks about digital technology where we can avoid unnecessary noise by using headphones and earphones. That is how Schafer and Krukowski discuss about the relationship space and sound.